Pain is one of the basic clinical symptoms. There is a worldwide need for effective pain treatments. The urgency of the requirement for therapeutic methods for providing tailored and targeted treatment of chronic and non-chronic pain, this being taken to mean pain treatment which is effective and satisfactory from the patient's standpoint, is also evident from the large number of scientific papers relating to applied analgesia and to basic nociception research which have appeared in recent times.
Conventional opioids, such as for example morphine, are effective in the treatment of severe to very severe pain, but they often lead to unwanted accompanying symptoms, such as for example respiratory depression, vomiting, sedation, constipation or the development of tolerance. Moreover, they are frequently insufficiently effective in the case of neuropathic pain, suffered in particular by tumour patients.